Mind probed to solve gambling puzzle

Hooked on Gambling: Third in a three-part series

Piecing together the information doctors know about the biology of pathological gambling is like solving a difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers like Dr. Jon Grant.

"This is not simply an issue with people with poor or weak moral character as some myths portray it," said Grant. "This is an addiction. It is complex."

Grant is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota who specializes in studying compulsive gambling. For eight years, he has been searching for a medical solution to curb cravings associated with problem gambling.

He and his research team have done brain scans and other tests that indicate chemicals and receptors react differently when compulsive gamblers are calm and when they're revved up to bet.

The most recent results of that work - published in February's edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry - advances evidence that pathological gamblers are physically different from other types of gamblers.

Compulsive gamblers who took the experimental drug Nalmefene, for instance, were less impulsive than those given a placebo.

"For the last 10 years, there have been rumblings that it's a biological problem," Grant said. "This gives a lot more support to that theory."

While researchers have only recently started to record results for drugs that help overcome the urge to gamble, doctors have been working on the neurobiology aspects of gambling for more than two decades.

The late Dr. Robert L. Custer, a pioneer in compulsive gambling research, convinced the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 to classify the impulses of addicts as a disease much like Tourette syndrome and pyromania.

Custer categorized gamblers as professional, antisocial, casual, serious, escape and compulsive.

Professional gamblers, he said, were not compulsive even though they took risks and gambled frequently. He said they used gambling as a job, showing clear-headed money skills, reasoned strategies and the ability to walk away without losing their bankroll.

Custer characterized antisocial gamblers as withdrawn but not compulsive, casual gamblers as infrequent players, serious gamblers as those who use counting or tracking techniques to beat the odds at card tables, and escape gamblers as those who occasionally get away from reality through gambling.

Grant said gambling addiction could become a "huge social problem" as legal gambling grows in popularity through such things as televised poker tournaments and the greater availability of impulse games like slot machines.

"We're seeing different demographics - people from all walks of life - involved," he said. "It suggests that this is going to be a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on."

At the University of Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions, John Welte has been working to quantify the scope of the problem through research that involved interviewing 2,631 people.